Iva Galiová

"Dad already knew that the war was coming to an end, so he went to Ženklava to get my sister and locked her upstairs in the room so she couldn't go out. The Russians, when they came, said, 'Davay vodka, davay! [Give me vodka!]' My parents had a glass of rum, vodka, so they gave them a shot. But they said: 'Gde devochka? [Where is a girl?]' Mum said she'd call the girl. I was also upstairs and they called me. I was a child, skinny, thin, eleven years old. They were not interested. They wanted a devochka of about 15, so my parents concealed my sister. They knew that they would have jumped on her and locked themselves in a room somewhere with her and would have pointed guns at our parents. They had been on the road for a long time, and they desired women in Příbor. Then we learned that two 16-year-old girls had been raped and had to undergo medical intervention."

"That was the neonatal ward, which was part of the maternity ward. For me there, it was the worst job I had ever done. [I did it] for about a year. Because I used to take babies on a trolley to their mothers for breastfeeding. That meant I had between thirty-two and thirty-eight babies there and I was on my own. I had to weigh them all before breastfeeding on the scale where there was a kind of curved tray, write it down, take the babies to the mothers. The last breastfeeding was before midnight. Then I collected them again after the breastfeeding, each baby had a bracelet with a number on it, and I had to write down the weight again, how much they had drunk. For example, they were supposed to drink 600 milliliters, but the mother told me that not much milk had flowed from either breast, so she expressed the milk and I had to feed the children. Those were the worst shifts for me. I didn't sit down for five minutes all night to even have a drink."